Posts Tagged → Sunday hunting
PGC’s strange hunter survey
Today a Pennsylvania Game Commission email arrived, asking if I would participate in a brief hunter survey. Being 100% opinionated about everything, naturally I acquiesced. “Shy” was maybe used to describe me when I was young, but not as an adult. Because I consider myself a careful thinker, committed only to First Principles from America’s founding and to The Bible, and being relatively uncommitted to mass movements or parties, I enjoy sharing my perspectives with people who are open minded and interested in understanding different points of view than the prevailing narratives hawked by the Mainstream Media Corporate Industrial Complex.
The PGC survey consisted of really just three questions, all of which were about hunting waterfowl such as ducks and geese.
First question was did I hunt ducks last season, to which I responded No, I Did Not Hunt Ducks Last Season. The reason being that although I live just two blocks from that once famous migration route on the mighty Susquehanna River, the current duck migration down the Susquehanna River is not even a shadow of its former self. Rather, the duck migration here does not exist and has not existed for twenty years. I see more ducks lounging about and crapping on people’s yards in Italian Lake City Park across the street from my front yard than I see out on the Susquehanna River sitting on a bucket with a shotgun in my hand.
So, unless I travel to the Chesapeake Bay to hunt ducks, it is rare for me to get out after them any longer. Without Sunday hunting like all the surrounding states have, my opportunities for waterfowl hunting in Pennsylvania are pretty limited to what I can access quickly and easily. Like the dead Susquehanna River within sight of my dining room window.
Second question asked which Goose Zone I hunted in. Easy enough to answer.
Third question, which was broken down into three different alternatives, pertained to which of three unbearable and useless goose hunting seasons I liked or did not like, and how much I liked them or disliked them. All three alternative seasons PGC presented were unnecessarily fragmented from late October into February, and included very little early season but lots of late and really super late season. The problem being that the southward goose migration is heaviest in the part of October when the PGC shuts down our goose hunting, and the goose migration is entirely over by the time the PGC season opens back up. Fat lot of help these potential seasons offer!
This is a curious situation, which I have never had satisfactorily answered. Some hunters I know say that the Susquehanna River Waterfowlers, to which the PGC looks for hunter guidance, is made up of anti-Sunday hunting fuddy duddys who would rather give up hunting entirely than see Pennsylvania hunters get our share of the goose migration and also have Sunday waterfowling. True or not, this is what I am told.
Other hunters I know say that the PGC is hopelessly tangled up with the US Fish & Wildlife Service on all kinds of policies, not the least of which is that PA has a boatload of passionate hunters who, given the least opportunity, will, it is said by wildlife management officialdom, destroy, decimate, eliminate, and exterminate every duck, goose, gander, coot, loon, pimpernel, plover, and shoveler that flies, walks, waddles, crawls, or ducks through the migration route between New York and Maryland. And so, according to this view, Pennsylvania waterfowl hunters must be artificially hamstrung and kept from going afield when the birds are flying the most. Again, I do not know how much truth there is to this, though I will testify to the fact that Pennsylvania does in fact field a lot of hunters. A lot.
And so we get to my response to the three ridiculous seasons proposed in the PGC survey: Not one of them makes any sense; all three are equally nonsensical alternatives.
What is the point of giving me various dates to hunt if the animal we are hunting is no longer in the venue in those dates, but has long since flown the coop and is doing leisurely backstrokes in Florida and Louisiana?
It appears that the PGC knows its three silly seasons are indeed silly, and yet the agency is overtly committed to them.
“You can have a crap sandwich, a sh*t sandwich, or an imaginary sandwich,” is what PA waterfowl hunters are presented here.
This means Pennsylvania waterfowl hunters outside the Philly area southeast corner and outside a couple of interesting little “habitat and flyway bubbles” around Lake Erie and Shenango Lake in Western PA are officially SOL and just wasting their time sitting with a shotgun on a bucket and freezing solid past late December.
This current no-win situation begs for a bigger than life solution, but it also reminds me of the old Sunday hunting situation, where the PA Farm Bureau stole our private property rights for decades by artificially preventing any Sunday hunting. Only by marginally nibbling around the political edges did PA hunters finally get three weenie Sundays to hunt big game, and one suspects that such a small and unsatisfying “solution” is what is in store for PA waterfowlers, if a solution is to be had at all.
Maybe PGC will add more waterfowling days afield in March, when every single last duck and goose north of the Mason Dixon Line has landed in Costa Rica for the winter. Thanks but no thanks, PGC.
I for one, though I undoubtedly represent many others, would like to hunt ducks and geese in Pennsylvania at or closely around the same times/dates/days that hunters in New York are hunting them. But that would make sense, and if there is one thing I have learned as a PA waterfowl hunter, our seasons here are not intended to make sense.
Freedom Sunday
Aaaaahhhh, the swell feeling of freedom.
A few days ago, I sat up in a tree stand in Perry County with a loaded crossbow, waiting for a legal buck to walk by. A legal buck in this area of Pennsylvania has at least three points on one side of his antler rack.
The most distinguishing feature of this afternoon deer hunt was that it was occurring on a Sunday. Sunday hunting (beyond coyotes and foxes) is a new addition to Pennsylvania, and as of 2020 we have three Sundays to hunt deer or bear. People like me prevailed in obtaining these mere three Sundays to hunt only after a protracted 25-year battle with the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, whose nonagenarian board members constantly shook their canes at freedom lovers.
We lovers of freedom are also by nature opponents of government overreach, and yet while the PA Farm Bureau is against all kinds of government overreach, they were all fall-on-their-sword supportive of a government ban on Sunday hunting. Even on private property, where land owners could make their own personal choice about how to spend their weekend. The PA Farm Bureau would not, and still will not, budge one inch in their opposition to any sort of Sunday hunting. And incredibly, Pennsylvania’s laundry list of career elected officials went along with the PA Farm Bureau’s twenty nonagenarians, and against the wishes of just about everyone else.
So while we await the day when the Liberty Bell shall yet ring again and proclaim liberty throughout the land, granting Sunday hunting from October 1st through February 15th, we must enjoy what crumbs we may glean from the grips of the power and control obsessed.
This present gridlock situation made my three hours of Sunday afternoon archery hunting bittersweet. On the one hand, I was in fact experiencing one Freedom Sunday. Better than nothing, right? On the other hand, sometimes a taste of honey is worse than none at all, and while I sat there my mind kept involuntarily counting the number of Sundays we were being unfairly excluded from enjoying.
If you are curious, the number of Sundays we hunters are being deprived in Pennsylvania is nineteen (19). That may seem like very few days to the person who gets to do whatever they want to do seven days a week, 365 days a year, and without false moralists looking over their shoulder in hypocritical judgment of whatever their choice of entertainment may be on any particular day. But to us hunters, whose season runs from early October to mid February, and again the month of May’s turkey season, those nineteen days are a huge deal. We can’t make up for them in the summer months. We can’t get them back once they have passed.
This means that we Pennsylvania hunters are missing a significant percentage of freedom in our lives as otherwise free citizens. This freedom is being unfairly deprived to us, stripped out of our hands, out of the lives of our children. It is a bizarre situation, when we look at the states around us that have unlimited Sunday hunting.
For example, a week ago I began an annual wilderness hunt out of state on a Sunday morning. The trail head parking lot I started out from was packed with the pickup trucks and SUVs of fellow hunters, many of whom I learned later are tradesmen and contractors, whose work loads are heavy all week long, and whose weekends are their real opportunity to pursue their hobbies and pastimes. Our presence as free hunters, free citizens, in the Sunday woods bothered no one, impacted no one. Pennsylvania needs a lot more of this same Freedom Sunday.
Freedom Sunday: Me deer hunting on private land last Sunday. Hurting no one, bothering no one. Why not more of this Sunday freedom?
Thank you Sunday Hunting activists!
Despite many last minute bold-faced betrayals and stabs-in-the-back by the PA Farm Bureau that delayed and delayed and delayed the passage of SB 147, which allowed for hunting on just three Sundays, the bill finally passed the PA House today.
It now goes to the PA Senate for a concurrence vote. It has already passed the PA senate once before, thanks to the bold leadership of Senator Dan Laughlin from Erie, so this should be a perfunctory and symbolic vote, some time in the next few weeks. After that it goes to Governor Wolf, who has said he will sign it.
Unfortunately, because of the PA Farm Bureau’s vindictive approach, where they knew they were going to lose this issue so they tried to delay its implementation for as long as they could, to deny hunters the pleasure of more hunting time afield with our children, we will not get Sunday hunting this big game season. It will have to come into play in the spring of 2020.
As some of you know, my son and I do not hunt on Saturdays. This put us at a disadvantage with other hunters who do hunt on Saturdays. We would happily trade our Saturdays for the following Sundays, but that was never considered by the PA Farm Bureau, who simply demanded that everyone goose-step in unison and follow their marching orders.
So Isaac and I very much appreciate those Pennsylvanians who empathized with our plight these many years, and who felt our pain when official state law excluded us from participating equally with all other Pennsylvanians in something we love to do, and who stood with us and advocated for our equal rights all this time.
Rosa Parks did not NEED to sit at the front of the bus, but she wanted to, and she deserved to have that choice. For at least three days next year, my son and I will not have to sit at the back of the hunting bus.
Thank you to all who got this done.
Special appreciation goes to Robb Miller, the Governor’s Sportsmen’s Advisor and a long-long time professional politico who has championed Sunday hunting through thick and thin for at least twenty years; to Kathy Davis Gehman, who founded HUSH (Hunters United for Sunday Hunting) and led the legal charge and associated fundraising, in which I was one of the plaintiffs; to Harold Daub, who picked up the HUSH gauntlet when the rest of us were dispirited, donned his armor, and led the next political and social charge; to Kevin Askew and Jahred Klahre, two young guys who joined Harold at HUSH and really put the fine touches on the public outreach that became so effective. National Shooting Sports Foundation staff, the NRA, Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania, PFSC – the PA Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs (now Conservationists), United Bow Hunters of PA, and many other groups and individuals also helped in both big ways and small to get this passed.
In these politically divided days, it is important to note that this effort took hard work from professional political partisans in both the Democrat and Republicans parties, and also from generic registered Republicans and Democrats at the grass roots level. It is truly a bi-partisan issue, and it took members of both political parties working together to get it this far. In the sense that America and states like Pennsylvania are well served when diverse people find common political ground to solve big issues, this is a victory.
Above all else, this is a victory for individual liberty over Big Government.
And if you don’t like Sunday hunting, you do not have to hunt on Sunday. That is your choice, your freedom.
God bless America.
The importance of Sunday hunting – come join us
Hunting is more than recreation. It is more than even “making meat,” so your family can survive.
Hunting is one of the few authentically human of activities left to us, we modern humans, shells of our former paleolithic selves that we are.
Today, in America, we hunt to be fully human, to demonstrate that we are still engaged with our ecosystems as the predator we became so many thousands of years ago.
Wild animals are still the cleanest, healthiest source of protein available. Getting your own meat through hunting is the most honest way to get food.
Sunday hunting here in Pennsylvania is nearly verboten. Somewhere in the 1860s a wave of religious commitment (a good thing) swept through America, and with it came “Blue Laws,” a very bad thing. Blue Laws are artificial contrivances to more or less force people to stay away from commercial activity on Sunday.
Here in PA we still cannot buy a car on Sunday, nor can we hunt for anything more than coyote, crow or fox.
Using the force of law to deprive the citizenry of choice on something like hunting, when it is really a private property rights issue, is simply wrong. Blocking private landowners from hunting on their own land on Sunday is bad law, bad government, and it must be changed, for so many reasons.
Providing more Sunday hunting opportunities will open up about 50% more hunting time for Pennsylvanians, who typically can only hunt on Saturday, if they even have Saturday off from work. We are losing hunters, we need to recruit more hunters, and this is the biggest step we can take toward getting hunters back into the numbers where we are a measurable force for conservation and gun rights.
At 2:00 PM on March 11th at the PA Game Commission headquarters here in Harrisburg, a meeting is being held about how to get the Sunday hunting effort moving forward again. Some may recall I served as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit several years ago. So much effort was put into that, and then RINO Yvette Kane struck. Kane, now a federal judge who openly accepts valuable gifts of jewelry and cars from law firms doing business before her bench, said that Sunday hunting was not a federal religious freedom issue, and sent us to state court, which said it was a federal issue.
We cannot get justice anywhere.
And this is the conundrum we face. Pennsylvania is one of the very last hold-outs on Sunday hunting in America. All but a few states allow full Sunday hunting, during hunting seasons, which are typically during the Fall and winter. Every state surrounding us is a commie state, and yet they allow meaningful Sunday hunting. Only PA is stopping a million of its citizens from fully realizing their recreational dreams and best family time.
Please come join us on March 11th at the PGC HQ, at 2:00 PM, to work on the political solution to this silly problem. Your grandchildren will thank you.
It’s official: Sunday hunting in VA
Two weeks ago the Virginia state House passed a Sunday hunting bill out of a committee that had bottled up similar bills for decades before. It was a surprising statement that it actually got through committee. Then it passed the full state House, which surprised even its most ardent sponsors.
Well, today the Virginia state Senate passed the companion bill. It allows hunting on private land on Sunday, a private property rights win if there ever was one. If you pay property taxes, say on a remote mountainside property, and you are deprived of 14.2% of your full use of that property for some vague reason, you might get frustrated. It is your property. You can shoot 1,000 bullets at a target on Sunday, but you cannot shoot just one at a squirrel. Laws like this are by their definition arbitrary, the bane of democracy.
Virginia’s governor says he will sign the bill into law.
Welcome to the modern era, Virginia! We are envious of you.
Kudos to Kathy Davis of PA-based Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (www.huntsunday.org), who has devoted the past two years of her life to this issue, and who helped a great deal with getting the Virginia law passed and the lawsuit filed there. The lawsuit compelled the state legislature to act, before a judge ruled against the state and the entire state was opened up. While I would like to see public land open for Sunday hunting, I am satisfied with private land as a start to implementing it state-wide. This really is an issue of the most basic American rights.
Hunters United for Sunday Hunting @ Great American Outdoor Show
Hunters United for Sunday Hunting will be in booth 4511 in the Outfitters Hall of the Great American Outdoor Show. Come see us.